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In line with the cooperation agreement with London School of Economics in the field of construction and building, KFAS organizes a lecture and a workshop for the housing sector

The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS), in collaboration with the London School for Economics and Political Sciences (LSE), held a lecture at Al-Shaheed Park entitled "Cities and the new climate economy: on the role of urban form and transport " followed by a workshop entitled "Resource Urbanisms Kuwait.” The events were attended by engineers, architects, academics, entrepreneurs, and various youth groups from related sectors.

The lecture presented the preliminary results of the LSE Cities’ project conducted through KFAS’ agreement with LSE. It studies cities and urban development and their association with the abundance and cost of natural resources, the most salient of which are land and energy, and the relationship of these resources with building cities, housing and transportation.

Mr. Yousef Al-Mazeedi , the Program Manager at the Office of International Programs at KFAS, announced that these activities come under the Kuwait program at LSE, which are among the international programs dedicated to linking the private sector and policy-makers to scientific research and local and international research institutions, to educate them on the value of scientific research and enable research institution to identify their needs and cater to them.

He added that the most important objective of the workshop is to bring together engineers, architects, academics, policy makers and other participants related to the fields of architecture and construction with together and LSE researchers to discuss the preliminary findings of the LSE Cities’ aforementioned research project, and enable the deployment of this project’s outputs by relevant sectors in Kuwait.

Mr. Al-Mazeedi reiterated that building local capacity in areas of national priority is one of the most important goals of the Foundation’s. For that end, KFAS cooperates with universities that are malleable to our needs in capacity building and evidence-based policy-making in areas of national priority, such as health, energy and housing.

He expounded by saying that the agreement with LSE is but an example of this type of cooperation. Another example is the agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which produced several collaborative research projects in a variety of topics such as sustainability of energy and urban design. He noted that the most recent KFAS-MIT collaborative research project was conducted by researchers from Kuwait University, the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, and MIT under the title: "The Sustainability of Kuwait Build Environment.”

It is worth noting that KFAS program at LSE arranges public lectures, symposia, workshops, publishes a series of prestigious research papers and articles, and supports post-doctoral researchers and PhD students, in addition to expanding the scope of academic networking between Kuwait University and institutions in the Gulf region.